


The Boy who Blew in with the Breeze

by Adventureling



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Allusions to Peter Pan, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Creature!Bill, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-20
Updated: 2017-10-20
Packaged: 2019-01-20 03:37:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12424251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adventureling/pseuds/Adventureling
Summary: In which Peter Pan comes to take a child away to Never-never land.





	The Boy who Blew in with the Breeze

**Author's Note:**

> Hello my darlings, this vignette is the first in a series concerning our dear Billy Boy. These particular pieces are, in part, inspired by the ao3 trend floating (giggles inappropriately) around regarding Creature!Bill as well as an amazing piece of artwork I found while exploring the bowels of Tumblr: pictorch's losers' club AU Bev, Bill, and Georgie edition, to be exact. Anyways, I'm unsure as to whether I'll expand on this particular short story throughout the rest of the series. I might, I might not. I guess it depends on how well this is received. Regardless, enjoy!

Janie quite likes her friend Billy.

At first, she had called him Peter because he was quite a bit like the boy from the story her mother had read to her all those times—the one with that impish fairy who sounded like bells and dastardly pirates and a boy who never grew up in a land that never changed. After all, what was she supposed to think when he flew through her open window that first humid summer night?

* * *

Mother had told her all about the great big moths with their great big wings who ate away at cloth and fabric and other soft things to be kept in dressers and drawers. Mosquitoes too, like humming birds that _went wrong_ , suckled blood from skin and possessed, from what mother had told her, a special craving for little girls who kept their windows open at night. Janie had been ready for those, and even the curious dots of light she saw dancing in the night sometimes—fireflies, she amends. She had endeavored to catch one once—though they had nimbly evaded her in the end. The graceful bugs had tumbled through the air and soared above her head like acrobats in a circus. It was something a bit like magic.

So was it really so far fetched that little Janie Pruis liked to pretend, just for those occasional nights when she could see the dancing lights, that fireflies were fairies come from Neverland?

Later, Janie will contemplate how Billy isn’t much like a firefly—though his smile is as bright as any light. He’s no fairy either since all fairies have wings, obviously.

It should be no surprise at all as to why Janie had not been entirely prepared when a boy—a boy, imagine that!—floated through her window, pushing past curtains of rose pompadour into a room not quite a bedroom and not quite a nursery. No bugs but a boy. Mother, asleep a hallway away with her closed window with no bugs and no boy, had been wrong. What a thought!

A night light, shaped like a turtle and illuminating the far corner of the room in swaths of minty green, touched gently at the contours of his face, all delicate-like and barely revealing anything at all. He had a hat though, that much Janie was sure of. However, instead of a feathered cap canted off-center, there is an almost absurdly large top-hat positioned precariously on the boy’s head. For a moment, Janie thinks Mr. Peanut has come to pay her a visit.

Upon closer inspection, however, Janie makes out the bareness of a youthful face, no woolly mustache in sight. The brim of the boy’s hat obscures his eyes, making it impossible to discern if there is a distinguished monocle in place no matter how hard Janie squints and strains her eyes.

A subtle shift, and the light traces an angular figure. Gangling limbs reveal an unsettling thinness as if the boy is only bone and skin and nothing else at all. Maybe that’s all you need to make a boy. Boys are quite strange after all.

Still, Peter Pan is not quite how Janie envisioned him, and so she pouts just a little. Her sulk, a subtle jut of lip and a pinched expression, is nothing too dramatic. Just where was the elfin boy with splendidly uncombed hair and dirty, scabbed knees? Where was the half-feral boy, the rakish wild child from the story?

Still, she queries, “Are we going away to Never-never land?”

The boy is still, his earlier movement his only movement, and silence settles once more into the space between them. A second goes by, then two, then more. Janie waits, wondering if he will ever answer. Another shift, this time a gloved hand, small and dainty, white and pristine, reaches for the brim of the hat and, upon finding purchase, gently lifts.

Janie gasps.

Crawling forward, she pays no heed to the noisy crinkling of the duvet, feather and air-filled as it is, beneath her; nor did she stop when the bunched sheets tangled about her skinny ankles and caught like rope. She simply tugged harder, tugged free. Easy Peasey.

“Wow! Your eyes sure are pretty,” she gushes. Tilting her head, her brown curls tumbling over small shoulders and sharp clavicle, tongue peeking out of a mouth corner in concentration, Janie observes the youth before her—especially his eyes. 

What a color. You could look through a box with a hundred crayons and never find it. 

“Blue fire,” she eventually discerns. Just as she offers these words—like a fishing line, these words are, a reel to lure the blue-eyed boy into conversation, or perhaps just the utterance of a single word, even just a syllable—a curiously chilly breeze brushes past her skin. Goose flesh is teased to the surface, and she is suddenly, inexplicably, conjuring images in her mind of far off nights filled with cold and ice and snowflakes. No, blue fire isn’t quite right. Something about those words refused to roll off the tongue, as if they didn’t fit quite right in her mouth. It was like trying to fit the circle in a space with three sides—like in that dumb baby game Aunt Molly used to make Janie play during those dreaded bi-yearly visits. Again, she thinks of that particular kind of cold, and then of warm, crackling hearths—fires in a season where there should be none.

“…Winter Fire,” she rectifies. This time, the words, these words, slide off Janie’s tongue as smooth as honey—and twice as sweet.

Her conclusion is punctuated by a curt nod, all conviction and no room for question. Those winter fire eyes burn bright like how a firefly might. They practically glow in the dim of her room. Would he slip through her fingers and fly away through the window like a firefly if she tried to touch him? She certainly couldn’t capture him—he was much too big for a glass jar.

“How’d you get all the way to Derry from the second star to the right?” Because who else could a boy who flies through windows at this hour be?

Another pause. 

"Wa-wa want-t-t to fl-float with me-e?" a high, scratchy voice murmurs, tripping over consonants and vowels and everything in between.

Janie claps her hands eagerly, forgetting her earlier questions because Jeezum-crow, and rushes towards the boy who blew in with the breeze.

_Float_ , after all, is just another word for _fly_. 


End file.
